2.10 Beta2 and Come see us in Naples, Florida!

Back from Astricon a week ago and catching up … for those of you who made it out to Denver last week, it was great to see you! If you weren’t able to make it, maybe we’ll see you in a MUCH SUNNIER PLACE in [url=/open-telephony-training-seminar]NAPLES, FLORIDA[/url] at our next [url=/open-telephony-training-seminar]Open Telephony Training Seminar[/url] quickly coming up in January! To be fair, Denver is usually very sunny but we happened to get one of those [i]”once every 5 year”[/i] late October snow storms that can hit the front range.

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For starters, we told you about an [url=/news/2011-10-10/2-10-update-and-come-say-hi-at-astricon-this-year]awesome FreePBX Appliance raffle[/url] we were going to hold at our booth and we are very happy to see that the winner is a well known member of the FreePBX and greater Asterisk community, Nir Simionovich pictured here laden with boxes that were his responsibility to get back to Israel upon his return! We again thank Schmoozecom.com as well as the other suppliers listed on the previous blog post for their extreme generosity on this super giveaway! The event was a great networking opportunity as usual and we were glad to see many of you during the course of the 3 days. I gave a talk on what we have been up to with FreePBX 2.10 though if you’ve been following this blog then you’re already on board.

If you did not make it out, or are simply looking for more FreePBX specific opportunities where I think we can GUARANTEE it won’t snow, come join us at the next [url=/open-telephony-training-seminar]Open Telephony Training Seminar[/url] in SUNNY Naple, Florida January 24-26th. Our last event in Cleveland was a huge success to the point that we had to turn away several late comers because lack of capacity. So get your registration in early to make sure you not only get a seat in the training, but you also take advantage of the Early Bird pricing currently available and if you purchase it this year, you will get a tax deductible business expense for this calendar year as well! We continue to make substantial improvements to the class increasing the lab content and updating the curriculum to track the rapid pace of FreePBX so come be part of this great opportunity!

On the 2.10 front (which will be featured in Naples, FL), we silently rolled beta2 before Astricon through the online module repository. If you are currently on the distro and have been doing updates you should be there already, or you can [url=/download-freepbx]grab the Distro[/url] to install it or pull the FreePBX tarballs from there as well to upgrade. We’ve talked about many of the changes going on in both the [url=/news/2011-10-10/2-10-update-and-come-say-hi-at-astricon-this-year]previous blog[/url] and an [url=/news/2011-09-22/freepbx-2-10-beta-lots-of-credit-to-the-schmoozecom-com-team]earlier blog post[/url] so I’ll skip to a few points that need mentioning.

One thing that we recently added to beta2 is an option to include completely anonymous Google Analytics code in FreePBX. We are doing this as a very handy way to collect browser information and various other data such as FreePBX/Asterisk versions. It is not a whole lot different then what we pull in Module Admin but adds the browser side information. Why are we doing this? As we add more ‘Fancy’ GUI features to FreePBX the challenge of cross browser compatibility grows more difficult. By collecting such data, it helps us make informed decisions where to focus energy, or where NOT to focus energy, based on what you are using. If you have an issue with this it can be turned off on the Advanced Settings page but we have turned it on by default in order to get more useful information. We made this choice since people with concerns will clearly turn it off but it’s not very common for people to go seeking out how to turn this on if they even know about it. We have also made sure that FreePBX posts a notification the first time this is turned on so that you are aware of it and to tell you how to turn it off if you don’t wan this. So … if there are concerns about what we have done here, please bring them up for discussion now. We want to develop the best product we can using the most user based information we can and we want to hear from you if you have other suggestions or concerns.

In the meantime, although most of the feature work is done given we are in beta2, there are a few things going on that we want to try and get in before locking down the functionality and entering into a release candidate stage. One late comer is changes to the Paging and Intercom module that will introduce the ability to use app_confbridge as an alternative to the current paging that depends on MeetMe being present. This becomes a big win for those systems that are depending on app_confbridge and consistent with the direction Asterisk is moving towards in 10.0. This is currently being driven by Schmooze where we have a lot of phones to test large page groups, and we’ll be getting that into the 2.10 repository very shortly!

For now, that’s the update. We’ll see about providing a link the the version upgrade module soon for those running 2.9 who want to hop on board and we’ll drive towards getting that module put onto the 2.9 repository which will open the flood gates for more extensive testing by a much larger portion of the community!